Dedicated Class “C” IP addresses for SEO

The liars and schemers in the world are costing all of us a lot of money and “happiness” every day, but get away with it because in general, good people forgive them. So the bad guys go on and on hurting others. What does this have to do with SEO? Hah! Everything.

I just spent 2 hours on an issue that should not have taken 2 hours. It consumed the “extra” 2 hours (inefficiency in our world) because Google makes so many mistakes (at best) which spread disinformation, and because Google forcefully imposes it’s will to out-compete everyone else (at worst) for profit.

I believe the VAST MAJORITY of SEO publishers are complicit in those efforts. In other words, if you are an SEO person and you publish to the web about SEO, I am indeed blaming you for making things worse, and costing me that lost 2 hours (or at least 80% of you).

The cycle of silliness in web publishing related to search engines is endless and complex and laughable, if not only super boring. Many smart people have moved on not because they got tired of SEO, but because they got so tired of the nonsense time wasting parts of SEO that exist for no other reason than the fact that Google seems to create the mess on purpose, and seemingly clueless seo “professionals” propagate it.

Here I was teaching someone about SEO, and just this one little SEO issue cost over 2 hours to pursue with no useful information outcome.

I went back through a decent amount of the SEO “literature” about dedicated IP addresses for SEO. What trash! From the super-authoritative sounding rants of full-of-nonsense seo haters, to the imposter authority of Matt Cutts posting on his “unofficial” blog, and including contributions from Cisco-certified networking specialists who apparently have never had a real job, as well as non-certified networking gurus who understand network architecture. Oh my god so much garbage and incorrect/deceptive information.

The CORE issue stems from SEO experts who say (over and over at every SEO meetup for like 15 years) that SEO demands a dedicated IP address for a website. From there, the nonsense begins. A reader of the historical record traverses a dizzying path of misinformation. Assumptions rule, and misdirection is common. Marketers (including accomplished propagandists like Matt Cutts) cleverly employ these situational factors to deliver point after point out of context, in ways that help confirmation-biased novices to conclude all sorts of “facts”. Hosting companies and vendors feed at the trough of confusion. One even named itself “SEO Hosting”, which I can only assume was a conscious decision to take the profits of successful marketing despite the risks of SEO. If that wasn’t the case? Then how sad was THAT!

Substitute any other common and valid “SEO question” for this IP address one, and it’s the same story. It’s no wonder so many web publishers suffered left-handed hockey stick growth charts in 2012, as Google ran off with the Internet money.

I attended a gold mining expo last week, and watched a seminar on panning for gold. For the demo, the miner loaded his dish with silt and water and then planted 12 flecks of “real gold” into it. After panning it empty, he had 10 of the 12 sitting all alone in the dish. Wow. That stuff is shiny! And the first comment from the peanut gallery when he showed off his black pan with 10 bright flecks of gold was.. “if you want to get rich panning for gold, sell gold panning equipment!”.

Exactly.

Google’s SERPs are a cesspool, and Google has been helping to fill it with crap. And all the while, fallible, judgmental, often righteous and commonly misguided Google employees flash the bright orange promise of the carrot, and whip the threatening penalty stick at web publishers, as if to fuel the fires of confusion… while they steal the profits and run off to the bank.

I don’t use terms like “fallible” and “judgmental” and “righteous” and “misguided” loosely. I have specific experience, repeatedly over the past 15+ years, to back up those labels assigned to Google and Google employees. It’s fact. But that doesn’t change things. They’ve been this way since the beginning, whether or not you chose to believe it back then (or now).

So what’s the answer to the dedicated IP address and Class “C” block issue, when dealing with SEO web hosting? The same as it has been FOREVER in SEO land. Nothing has changed. The stakes are higher than ever. The stick flies faster than it ever did, and I suggest the righteousness and misguided parts are also at all-time highs

But what’s “the answer”?? Do you need a dedicated IP address for SEO, or doesn’t it matter? The answer, is that it doesn’t matter.

Those of you who are still here, should think about that a second. I used an indefinite pronoun in that last sentence. A propagandist’s tactic. In this case, “what doesn’t matter” is the answer to the question. The answer doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters when considering unique IPs and SEO website hosting is what you do on your IP address and what Google does to your traffic. And that’s the secret to SEO. That is also why it doesn’t make sense to publish “how to” information on the topic of SEO, like articles about unique IP addresses and SEO hosting.

Let Google sell you on how there’s no technical difference between IP and name-based hosting. Let hosting companies sell you on how to rank better with unique, randomized “class c” IP addresses. Let the networking geeks proclaim the silliness of the nomenclature, or cite the practical realities. Let the SEO “experts” demonstrate how their worlds are fueled by correlations and assumptions, or reason and logic. But NONE of it matters.

The only thing that matters is how much traffic you are getting from search engines today, and how prepared you are for when some (insert adjective here) Googler shuts off that flow of traffic. And while you work on that… how much money you are making from search engine referrals to your IP address today, and what you will do when that stops (tomorrow?), make a decision about unique IP addresses for SEO web hosting

Additional Cheats to the Topic:

when a Googler takes action against you, starting with a “look” at “what you are up to”, what will they see?

when a Googler launches an automated profiler or script to “gather accurate information”, what will it produce?

when the anonymous and all-benevolent yet not-responsible “algorithm” analyzes and classifies your site in the web, what will it think?